How bioengineers and architects can together contribute to improve healthcare management: case study

With this work we want to underline how the cooperation between two separate research fields, bioengineering and architecture, can successfully produce new methods and products for healthcare management. In 1999 was set up in Careggi Hospital (Firenze, Italy) a permanent Lab called “Monitoring Laboratory” (MonLAB) involving university researchers and professors from Architecture, Biomedical Engineering and (in the earlier stage) Medicine, together with health care system operators, estate management operators and external professional consultants. The reorganization of a big hospital structure may always be viewed as a part of a complex process: it is a multi-program about functional and technical safety, rethinking of sanitary offer, continuity of functions of health care structure during the whole reorganization process. This work started from a “request for help” that came to authors by the Careggi’s technical department head office when the hospital was in the right middle of a huge requalification process. The terms of the demand were: “please give us a sedan to sail the sea of our building/technological estate; we need unbiased data to assess it and to assign some priorities to necessary interventions”. We decided to catch the challenge by designing a method and a software to get the most of the information we could find in the hospital.